Across the United States, from Florida to Seattle’s Pacific shore and in urban communities from Dallas and Sacramento, California to the east coast’s older cities, a new urbanism movement is cleverly being marketed. Developers and politicians alike have joined the bandwagon, happily posing with architects and urbanists in front of large-scale development schemes for Newsweek and Time magazine photo-opportunities. After nearly fifty years, popular culture is continually being told that the post-war American suburb is no longer capable of fulfilling the American Dream. Although the economy continues to enjoy a supposed national 2% growth rate, in the everyday life of urban, suburban and rural Americans loss is a key word – loss of family values, loss of a sense of community, loss of security, loss of individuality.

Nonetheless, the invisible hand of the late-capitalist market mechanism continues to rearrange social structures. The strengthening of corporatism is balanced by the weakening of democracy; government services are forever slipping into private hands – from social security (pensions) to education to health care. The budget of the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), since the Reagan and Bush administrations, has been slashed from $30 billion to $10 billion annually, and Congress is seeking to abolish the Department completely.
At the policy level, the current narrow view is focused tightly on short-term interests, exacerbating the state of economic illusion and imbalance. American society is living in a state of delusion. The socially and politically reactionary society, with its ravenous consumption of the present, has an insatiable craving for opulence, even if it cannot afford it. The mythic memory of a past where there existed a coherency between beauty and truth, ethics and aesthetics has been replaced by ‘form follows profit’, the aesthetic principle of the late twentieth century.

Collective Insecurity

The position of the architectural profession within this context is increasingly elusive. The continuing exodus from urban centres to contemporary exurban developments results from socio-economic, cultural and racial/ethnic tensions and breakdown of public services and infrastructural systems, working with continually diminishing budgets. Edge-city sprawl is consuming the landscape.
Alternatives to the status quo are welcomed, but to what extent are they possible/feasible? Visionary reformulation of the built environment, in the American context, is nearly impossible. Avant-garde European architects, working with the dual paradoxes of an architecture of instability and strategies of indeterminacy, have not yet penetrated the American scene beyond academia and large-scale imageering projects for the global media giants such as Disney and Universal Studios.
The intrinsic and, no doubt, irreversible anti-urbanism sentiment is a reality in the US as manifested by booming edge-city, exurban and suburban development. In Florida and California, home of imagineer industries, a group of enlightened opponents of reality have surfaced. The couple, Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk in Miami and Peter Calthorpe in Berkeley, have led in quickly popularizing the so-called ‘New Urbanism’ movement. Their recent developments have captured the popular American imagination, providing a physical realization of the unrequited love for the aesthetics of the European past, of the poetics of small-town life, of the virtues of self-styled sustainable communities and of the common-sense emphasis of the pedestrian over the automobile. However, the appeal of the New Urbanists has remained at the populist and bureaucratic level, especially gaining respect from opportunist politicians, state planning groups and developers.
The neotraditional aesthetic of the movement far overshadows its challenge to contemporary zoning and the banal standards of traffic engineering departments. These valuable technical and pragmatic tools are rarely discussed; instead, heated debates revolve around the elitism of a politically-correct sugar-coating of charming, mixed-use pedestrian friendly communities. However, it must be acknowledged, for better or for worse, that the influence and agenda of New Urbanism has gone far beyond the issue of taste.
Streets are laid out in grids, getting rid of the cul-de-sac, an icon of post World War II American suburbia.1) Garages are tucked into alleys behind closely spaced houses fronting the street. Housing types and income groups are meant to be diverse. New Urbanist communities blend a range of land uses including civic, retail, office and recreation. New Urbanism is to the 1990s what suburbia was to the 1950s: a vision of the Good Life made real.

Degenerate utopias

In the US, the programme of housing is, in essence, determined by corporate America, the dominant culture, the federal government and the banks. Federal tax breaks and guaranteed loans to suburbanites complement the banking industry’s sponsoring of generous loans for the purchase of 2-3 bedroom houses; smaller dwellings are considered to have less re-sale potential and therefore lending institutions are reluctant to take risks.
Add to that America’s addictive susceptability for illusions, covetedness of ideology (now the new gods of the marketplace and technology), the increasingly flexible economy and job market, instant communication and a land-value system that continues to maintain cheap acreage at the periphery, and it is no surprise that the inherent conservatism within the housing market has forcibly resurfaced. Throughout its history, American power is repeatedly tied to the pursuit of all-inclusive truths and utopias, evidence of an apparent desire to deny reality. New Urbanism is the degenerate utopia2) of the 1990s, nostalgically yearning for realization of Norman Rockwell imagery.
Private developers and big business, including several of which are publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange, are largely responsible for building the housing stock. Architects usually only work on one-off houses for a privileged minority. It would appear that the New Urbanists have brought housing again to the forefront of architectural culture, but this may not be so: as Duany has stated, ‘the development world interests me much more than the architectural world’.3)
This affinity for the development world may provide a partial explanation as to the overwhelming number of precedent-setting greenfield pattern (open land) schemes as opposed to brownfield urban infill (previously urbanized sites), both of which are widely used terms within New Urbanism. It is easier to imagine the new than to fix the old.
Duany and Plater-Zyberk have grounded their reputation in unabashedly elitist, precedent-setting greenfield-pattern urban resorts, such as Seaside (Walton County, Florida, 1981), Kentlands (Gaithersberg, Maryland, 1988) and Windsor (Indian River County, Florida, 1989). However, they have also investigated the opposite extreme through a strategic plan for downtown LA and proposals for a mobile-home village in Mesa, Arizona. Calthrope, author of The Next American Metropolis: Ecology, Community and the American Dream (Princeton Architectural Press, 1993), created a grand rhetoric in manifesto format, leaving many unfulfilled expectations. His largest built project to date, Laguna West (Sacramento County, California, 1990) is a low-density estate with builder-standard cul-de-sacs. Other architects considered to be within the core of the movement include Ray Gindros, Peter Katz, Daniel Solomon, Elizabeth Moule and Stefanos Polyzoides. There are also a number of architects who have been embraced by the New Urbanists, but have, in fact, been practicing many of the movement’s principles before they were institutionalized as part of a movement. Goody Clancy, a Boston firm, is one such example. The work of the firm is significantly more urban than many of the other New Urbanists and the firm’s founders admit to being leery of the hype of New Urbanism as a movement.

From CIAM to CNU

In the spring of 1996, the Fourth Congress of New Urbanism adopted a charter, signed by 262 delegates (including HUD Secretary Henry Cisneros), declaring ‘The Congress for New Urbanism (CNU) views disinvestment in central cities, the spread of placeless sprawl, increasing separation by race and income, environmental deterioration, loss of agricultural lands and wilderness and the erosion of society’s built heritage as one interrelated community-building challenge.’ The charter then asserts 27 principles, under three headings (region; neighbourhood, district and corridor; and block, street and building) to guide public policy, development practice, urban planning and design.
The principles are not radical, but instead appear obvious and simple. Conceptually, they may be summarized under three banners concerning density, civic space and codes. Post World War II suburbanization provided an automobile friendly infrastructure which supported one to two dwellings per acre. New Urbanism strives for a pedestrian friendly network to support 5 to 6 units per acre and, in theory, includes a mix of housing types including detached houses, row houses, apartments and ‘granny flats’ above garages. One of the greatest strengths of the New Urbanist movement has been its coherent critique of monofunctional land-use zoning, which has been driving American planning since 1908. Civic space is intended to be an integral part of neighbourhoods, as are retail and commercial space. Indirectly, the early work of both Aldo Rossi and Leon Krier has been imported to the CNU’s charter; however, a superficial reading of their typological studies has resulted in a homage to a fraudulent packaging of the past, dictated by codes.
CNU openly compares itself to CIAM; however the unimpassioned vision of the former works to mask contemporary conditions and coat them in an acceptable, profitable form. The enduring strength of CIAM, beyond its abstraction, formal language and radical urbanism schemes was its power of cultural criticism.
To date, the New Urbanists work has not been embraced by architecture culture, whereas it has not been academically proved as a critical project. The ‘revivalist’ aesthetic wards off serious consideration of New Urbanism, despite its quantitative research into the demographics, transportation patterns, legal instruments producing sprawl, and their prescriptive prototype counterproposals.
Nonetheless, the movement is growing fast – when CNU was founded, membership was by invitation only; with the Fourth Congress, membership was opened to the public and by August 1997 its numbers have swelled to over 600, including representation from Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom.

Strategy or prescription?

In the United States, the New Urbanists are among the limited circle of architects who have rigorously researched contemporary exurban development. They claim to have a strategic process of urban design where codes and building types redefine the streetscape as a reinvented public realm. Form is usually dictated at the public-private juncture and otherwise left to the market. However, through rewriting zoning and design guidelines, quasi-totalitarian control of the mixed-use, pedestrian-friendly developments has progressed to a fundamental alteration of public policy.
In the drive to create community, history is compressed. The designers of these instant towns attempt to build-in disjunctions and inconsistencies, trying to programme organic integrity to occur in a shortened period of time. Typically, the device to achieve this new uniformity is prescribed by a two-part code; an urban code contains height limits, bulk restrictions and build-to lines and an architectural code defines permitted materials, configurations and techniques. In most instances, New Urbanists do not mandate style, but the architectural code is a calculated strategy, encouraging historically-derived forms. The architectural code acts as a politically-correct, marketable prescription which masks the strategy of the urban code: the continuation of suburbanization.
The New Urbanists are often labelled as reactionaries. The power they have wielded at the policy level warrants the movement’s consideration as visionary in the sense that they prove that architecture and urbanism can be agents for social and political change, peaceful instruments for social transformation. However, it is this very notion that is also amongst the looming hazards of New Urbanism; their redefinition of underlying legal structures is dramatically changing the relationship between individual and society. Their codes are enforced via a framework of covenants, conditions and restrictions (known as CCRs), strictly governing each structure in the developments. Homeowners’ associations (known as HOAs), run by an elected board of owner residents, are the keepers of the vision that drew homeowners in the first place. Whereas non-owner residents cannot vote, HOAs represent, at best, only a limited form of democracy.
CCRs, normally attached by developers as deed restrictions when property is transferred to the homebuyer, govern the outward appearance of buildings and their surroundings. Their legal status is non-negotiable and all but impossible to change. Anyone wishing to alter the appearance of a home or storefront must first have the plans approved by the homeowners’ association’s review panel, many of which ban such artifacts and conditions as satellite dishes, unmowed lawns, political signs or working on a car in front of the house. HOAs are funded through monthly fees, which typically vary depending on the value of the home. In several states, HOAs act as quasi-government bodies, having been granted nearly all the powers of a local government. Authoritarian control is meant to create a village culture: for residents of master planned communities, the CCRs are not viewed as restrictions, but as forms of protection and safety. Perceptual boundaries that mark the limits of civic life and collective responsibility are systematically being replaced by an illusionary state of harmony – the result of dictatorial, dull compliance.

New Suburbanism

The definition of New Urbanism as small neighbourhood centres with pedestrian districts and linking separate corridors is, in fact, a replication of the 1930s Regional Planning Association of America (RPAA) model, founded by Benton McKaye, Lewis Mumford and Clarence Stein. Several of the New Urbanist principles endorse the suburban, anti-urban planning of the RPAA which contributed to the destruction of many American cities, including the Garden City, the Neighbourhood Unit, the ‘Radburn idea’. The new convenient and walkable communities are contributing to the proliferation of homogeneous subcentres, further colonizing open tracts of the American landscape.
The movement is neither new nor urban. It is a reformulation of conventional suburbia; instead of mere housing tracts, the contemporary master planned communities blend a range of land uses.

‘to end public housing as we know it’

In July 1996, HUD Secretary Cisernos recommended, via a pamphlet, ‘Principles for Designing and Planning Homeownership,’ 12 principles for public housing to begin applying. In so doing, HUD formally endorsed the principles of New Urbanism for the country’s distraught urban housing projects. The practical consequences of the political adoption of New Urbanism have yet to be fully evaluated; however, it is difficult to imagine how the underlying concepts will translate to lower-income city neighbourhoods in need of emergency relief.
Thus far, the New Urbanism hype has focused on large-scale new communities and homeownership, requiring large capital investments. Even HUD’s own ‘Homeownership Zones’ programme of low-interest loan subsidies requires a minimum of 300 units. These inner-city neighbourhoods in dire need of infill and micro-surgery are left out of the loop.
Although reducing auto-dependence to create a charming, mixed-use pedestrian-friendly community, is commendable, the appropriateness of these policies need be raised in cities where affordable public-transport is becoming a pipe-dream. Public-housing in the US has always carried dismal, physical as well as conceptual connotations. Nonetheless, the new policy of promoting photogenic, award-winning architectural design as a cure to society’s social ills, is irresponsible and a mask for a government retreating from the public realm. The first opportunities for the principles to be applied will be in Hope VI, a HUD programme created in 1993 ‘to find innovative means of transforming the nation’s most severely distressed housing projects.’ Two billion dollars has been appropriated for the programme and thus far, $1.5 billion has been awarded to 38 public-housing authorities. Nonetheless, according to Christopher Horing, HUD’s deputy assistant secretary, ‘Hope VI is the end of public housing as we know it….’ just as Americans have sought to end ‘welfare as we know it,’ ‘big government as we know it…..’

Architecture as society’s unbribable witness

If architecture is, as the Mexican poet Octavio Paz claims, ‘society’s unbribable witness’, the essential question becomes how can architects operate within and manipulate the market/cultural conditions in the creation of communities? The architect and the profession need to find/redefine a new position for themselves within the prevalent conditions of reality – ‘return for revenue’, intensified specialization and individualization, the media cult of the ‘image’ and the obsession with success.
Architecture always expresses cultural values and therefore may not exclude the political or the economic. New design strategies can be devised to guide the Metropolis in a determined socio-political manner while simultaneously being adaptable to undetermined market forces. New paradigms can make the reality of our imperfect modern world work. The escapist route of ‘political correctness’ and a nostalgic romanticism of past objects and urban experiences can be avoided. Alternative land settlement patterns can facilitate the inescapable reality of continual recolonization of territory.
New Urbanism is nothing more than a shroud for enclaves of middle-class homeowners, under which everyday reality is buried in an enchanting transformation of town and landscape. It is a dangerous experiment in social engineering, creating homogenous settlements with mindless controls and vigilante enforcement of the image of community. Most projects exclude low-income families by not including affordable housing in the mix.
A new urbanism for America must deal with the heterogeneity of the population; with the varying images of community and realization that not everyone wants community. It must confront its own principles more convincingly by rebuilding existing urban centres and cease to propose new urbanisms, suburbs, cities and towns. The tabula rasa condition is compelling, easy and a cop-out; the deteriorating urban centres that stretch from coast to coast deserve and warrant the attention of architects and urbanists.
At the close of the century, the architecture/culture equation is being seriously reconsidered. Culture, as a continually evolving (re)presentation of reality, is simultaneously being masked by an opportunistic use of history and nakedly exposed as its essential being – the mechanism of the market. Loss of culture, so feared in American society, presents a paradox. What is feared lost as high culture is superficially recovered in the name of history; and an artificial popular culture is created. The Great Leap Backwards conveys quintessential American culture as a product of reality – a collective unconscious lack of faith in the future and an indirect acknowledgment of strains in the present.

1. Although the icon of Amercian suburbia was formalized after World War II, the formula was institutionalized in 1934.

2. ‘Degenerate utopia’ is a term used by Umberto Eco in his essay ‘Travels in Hyperreality’, (Travels in Hyperreality, Picador, London, 1987, p. 43). He is quoting a definition by Louis Marin as used in an essay on Disneyland – ‘a degenerate utopia is an ideology realized in the form of a myth’.

3. Andres Duany, in ‘New Urbanism’, the winter/spring 1997 issue of the Harvard Design Magazine, p. 52.